Monday, January 12, 2015

Nix pill 18: nix store paths

Welcome to the 18th Nix pill. In the previous 17th pill we have scratched the surface of the nixpkgs repository structure. It is a set of packages, and it's possible to override such packages so that all other packages will use the overrides.

Before reading existing derivations, I'd like to talk about store paths and how they are computed. In particular we are interested in fixed store paths that depend on an integrity hash (e.g. a sha256), which is usually applied to source tarballs.

The way store paths are computed is a little contrived, mostly due to historical reasons. Our reference will be the Nix source code.

Source paths

Let's start simple. You know nix allows relative paths to be used, such that the file or directory is stored in the nix store, that is ./myfile gets stored into /nix/store/....... We want to understand how is the store path generated for such a file:

$ echo mycontent > myfile

I remind you, the simplest derivation you can write has a name, a builder and the system:

Output paths

Output paths are usually generated for derivations. We use the above example because it's simple. Even if we didn't build the derivation, nix knows the out path hs0yi5n5nw6micqhy8l1igkbhqdkzqa1. This is because the out path only depends on inputs.

It's computed in a similar way to source paths, except that the .drv is hashed and the type of derivation is output:out. In case of multiple outputs, we may have different output:<id>.

At the time nix computes the out path, the .drv contains an empty string for each out path. So what we do is getting our .drv and replacing the out path with an empty string:

It doesn't matter which input derivations are being used, the final out path must only depend on the declared hash.
What nix does is to create an intermediate string representation of the fixed-output content:

Conclusion

There are other types of store paths, but you get the idea. Nix first hashes the contents, then creates a string description, and the final store path is the hash of this string.

Also we've introduced some fundamentals, in particular the fact that Nix knows beforehand the out path of a derivation since it only depends on the inputs. We've also introduced fixed-output derivations which are especially used by the nixpkgs repository for downloading and verifying source tarballs.

Next pill

...we will introduce stdenv. In the previous pills we rolled our own mkDerivation convenience function for wrapping the builtin derivation, but the nixpkgs repository also has its own convenience functions for dealing with autotools projects and other build systems.